Using CiviCRM on Joomla

Most technical professionals end up doing website technical support for one or more community organizations. Most organizations need operational systems for managing members, handling dues payments and event registration fees and calender management, but these organizations frequently do not have the money to pay for a commercial services to support these needs. Many non-profits have adopted CiviCRM to handle these organizational capabilities. Although CiviCRM runs on Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, most CiviCRM installations are on Drupal which is beyond the technical capability of many small organizations.

Although Wordpress is a popular CMS for small organizations, it does not have the robust permissions system that both Drupal and Joomla have and is not well-suited to CiviCRM installations; in Wordpress, controlling access to sensitive information would be difficult, unreliable, or impossible. Because of the migration issues between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, Joomla may actually be a good alternative for Drupal 7 installations that do not want to make or cannot make the conversion to Drupal 8.

The article that follows describes the basic features of CiviCRM, how you can use the Joomla permissions system to control sensitive information, and how you can use Joomla menu options to present CiviCRM capabilities to end users.

CiviCRM is a Non-profit Oriented Customer Relationship Management System

CiviCRM provides both backend administrative tools that are accessible through the Joomla backend to users with administrative privileges, and frontend information and registration tools that are accessible through the Joomla frontend either publicly or to users with front-end privileges. For many non-profit community organizations these two capabilities are critical. There are several vendors that host CiviCRM installations, so if your organization loses the technical person who manages the CiviCRM installation, there is a fall-back alternative that is competitively priced compared to commercial membership management solutions.

Administering a CiviCRM installation is not a trivial undertaking; there are many decisions to be made for member types, document types, case types and numerous other things, so an organization must have a good technical succession plan in place before making the decision to implement a CiviCRM system. This is true of any membership management system.

Perhaps the biggest consideration in hosting a CiviCRM system for membership management will depend upon the risk of private data compromises and whether or not the organization can protect itself technically and legally from the risk of compromise.

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Written by Bruce Moore

Published: 30 January 2018

Created: 30 January 2018

Last Updated: 21 March 2018

Hits: 1760

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Photographing a Sailboat Race

Most small business owners will need to do some photography to support their web site and social media advertising. Although my business does not lend itself to a lot of photography, I am a serious amature photographer. Another hobby is sailboat racing. When looking for advice on shooting sailboat regattas; the only things I found were extremely basic discussions of aperture, shutter speed and ISO with minimal discussion of sailing-specific techniques. After shooting a couple of regattas where a professional photographer asked for advice and where I got a lot of requests for images, I decided to write an article. The article is aimed at professional phographers and amature photographers who will be photographing sailing events. It may also be of use for small business owners as a guide to thinking about photo shoot planning.

Equipment for Sailing Photography

The equipment necessary to photograph a regatta is actually fairly minimal under most circumstances. Plan to buy or borrow the following equipment:

• Life jacket that is comfortable. You should wear your life jacket, even if others on your boat are not. When you are shooting, you will have both hands occupied. If you boat driver needs to take immediate evasive action to avoid a competitor who has lost control, you will fall and end up in the bottom of the boat or in the water. Although I have never ended up in the water, I have ended up in the bottom of the boat just about every time I’ve photographed a sailing event. Life jackets make good padding.
• Hat. On a sunny day, this will make you cooler and more comfortable.
• Sunscreen. Waterproof SPF 50 is best.
• Rain/foul weather gear. If there is a breeze, you will get spray, even when it is otherwise a beautiful sunny day.
• A waterproof count-down timer watch (preferrably a yacht timer with 5-4-1-0 alarms and a sync feature).

Photographic equipment:

• Insurance, or an old camera. If your support boat is called upon to do a rescue, it is likely that the boat will spend a lot of time with the stern directly into the wind, which means a couple of inches of water in the boat. Even if your gear bag is waterproof, your gear may get submerged. If you fall in the water, your camera will go with you.
• Waterproof equipment bag. You will probably encounter spray, rain, water in your support boat, or all of the above. A good dry bag designed for canoeing can save the day.
• Camera(s). Any DSLR with auto focus, shutter priority exposure, and a continuous shooting mode will work. For continuous shooting of sequences for use in an instructional article, you will need a camera that can shoot continuously for at least ten seconds without filling up buffers. Unlimited continuous shooting capability is preferred.
• 300mm to 400mm image stabilized zoom lens. For starts, 80mm will probably include most of the starting line. For most other parts of a race, you will want about 300-400mm. With a lens less than 200mm, you will not be able to get close enough to the action without your support boat getting in the way of the competitors. Because your boat will be bouncing around all of the time, all of your shooting will be hand-held; lens longer that 400mm can be heavy to hold and stabilize. Image stabilization is really a must, as your boat will be constantly moving in three axes; without image stabilization you will need to use a shutter speed that forces an ISO that will give you noise problems on all but the most current professional equipment.
• Lens hood. At least some of your shooting will be into the sun, so lens flare will be a problem. A good lens hood is critical.
• UV/Haze filter. Although any filter will degrade lens performance, the certainty of spray makes a filter highly desirable, as they are easier and faster to clean than a bare lens.
• Polarizing filter. If you have a clear day, being able to darken the sky with a polarizing filter can be handy.
• Lens cleaning kit. With 100 percent certainty, you will get spray on your lens. Make sure to have a cleaning cloth and kit available.

Equipment to leave at home:

• Tripod. Your support boat will be moving up, down, forward, backward and sideways. You will not use it, so leave it home.
• Monopod.
• Flash. A flash will be useful for trophy presentations, but not for on-the water photography. One exception would be fill-flash for pictures of people on the various support boats.

Planning Photographs for a Race and Regatta

For any event, planning makes all the difference in the world, and photographing a sailboat regatta is no different. Once you have equipment lined up, you should start thinking about the plan for the day of the event, including objectives, the boat from which you will photograph, photographic technique, and where to be as the race unfolds.

Make sure to get a copy of the Notice of Race and the Sailing Instructions. These two documents will give the the schedule for the regatta and diagrams of the courses so you can plan how you want to photograph the races.

Objectives

Before you go out on the water, think about your objectives for the event. Some common objectives for regatta photography might be

• Photographs for club, national class association or other magazine or web publication. For these, you will want to concentrate on the top finishers in the event.
• Photographs of all participants to encourage participation. If you get a servicable photograph of the last place finisher, you will make this person’s year and probably earn a place as a screen saver photograph.
• Sequential photographs for instructional articles.
• Group and award presentation photos.

Getting on the Right Support Boat

For good photographs you need to be close to the action; getting on the right support boat is key.

• Most “spectator” boats are big and must stay a long way from the competitors to stay out of the way. It will be very hard to get good photos from the spectator boat.
• The signal boat (AKA “committee” boat)is a the absolute best location for photos of the start, but is the worst location after the start as it is usually stationary or keeps well away from the competitors.
• A mark set boat or rescue boat a good photography platform, up until the principal race officer decides to do a course change or a competitor capsizes and needs rescue.
• A dedicated photography boat is best, as long as the boat is small and nimble enough to get close to mark roundings.

Recruiting a Boat Driver

A good boat driver can make a mediocre photographer shoot outstanding images, while a bad driver can prevent an excellent photographer from shooting even mediocre images. The credits for regatta photographs should really go to the boat driver not the photographer. Look for a driver who can operate a boat well, but who is also an accomplished sailboat racer. A driver who is also an active helmsman can anticpate the action and get you in place before the really cool action happens, and tell you what is coming up so you can prepare.

Exposure

With an image stabilized lens, ISO 200, 1/400 of a second and f5.6 to f11 has worked well. If your camera’s sensor has low noise at ISOs above 200, by all means use higher shutter speeds.

Autofocus Mode

This is counter-intuitive for sports photography, but single-shot autofocus mode generally works best. Although continuous focus works well for other moving action, it generally does not work well in sailing. Because the shooting platform is moving in three axes and the subject is moving in three axes, continuous mode will frequently lose it’s lock on the subject and go through the process of re-acquiring a focus lock. Since the subject is relatively slow-moving, a focus from a half-press of the shutter is good for several seconds, and is much more reliable.

When to Shoot Single Photos

When you are trying to get photographs of all competitors, use single shot mode.

When to Shoot Sequences

If you are shooting to get photos for an instructional article on rules, tacking, jibing, or some other subject by all means use continuous mode, but recognize that on older or consumer grade cameras, you will fill up the buffer and may not be able to photograph the exact part of the sequence that you want to capture. If you are using a camera that cannot shoot an unlimited number of continuous photos, you may be able to extend the number of exposures by changing from RAW to JPEG, and by reducing the JPEG image size.

Photographing a Race

Pre-start and Between Race Photographs

This is the time to work on photos of every competitor; encourage people to sail by, look at you and mug for the camera.

Photographing the Start

If you are not on the signal boat, you will need to be below the lay line outside the signal boat and the starting mark (“pin”). Usually, the port or pin end of the line works best. Make sure that the stern is toward the wind, so that the driver can power to leeward to get out of the way of the competitors. If you have a second camera, this is the one time that you will want a lens of less than 80mm. For a 15-boat fleet, you can probably capture the whole starting line with an 80mm, but for larger fleets you will need shorter focal lengths.

Photographing the First Windward Leg

For the first windward leg, you can either follow the fleet up the leg and get stern-on photos of boats sailing upwind, or do a high-speed circle around the fleet to get photos of the windward mark rounding. Windward mark photos are good for publication photos; this can also be a good place to capture an image of each of th competitors as they round the mark. If there is very little wind, the wake generated by speeding to the windward mark will anger the competitors, so windward mark photos are only good when there is enough wind to generate waves that are equivalent to you support boat›s wake.

Photographing the First Run

If you take windward mark photos, you will only be able to get stern-on photos as the fleet goes down wind, and you will not be able to get leeward mark rounding photos. If you stay at the bottom of the course for the windward leg, you will be able to get leeward mark rounding photos, which can be exciting in a breeze.

Photographing a Leeward Mark Rounding

For leeward mark rounding photos, the best place to be is probably directly leeward of the mark about three to four boat lengths away. Unless they are out of control, you will not be in the way of any competitor, and you will be very close to the action for some very good photos.

If you are doing multiple races, you should shoot one rounding from a point slightly below the port-tack exit from the mark, but about ten boat lengths away. For this, make sure that the driver keeps the stern to the wind, so that you can power downwind to get out of the way of competitors, since you will be directly in their path. For publication photos of regatta leaders, this is the best location.

Photographing an Upwind Finish

The finish is an excellent place to capture images of each of the competitors, as this is the time when they will be the most spread out. The best position is about five boat lengths directly upwind of the port end of the finish line; from here you can capture bow-on photos of the boats approaching the signal boat on starboard tack, and upwind photos of boats approaching the pin on port tack.

Photographing a Downwind Finish

When the finish is downwind, you can get closer to the competitors than you might otherwise try to do; you know exactly where they are going and can get close without getting in the way. This offers some good crew-work photos of downwind sailing.

Post-processing Sailboat Photographs

The post-processing for regatta photos is similar to most post-processing but there are a couple of things that will require special attention: white balance and value, and figuring out the horizontal.

Maximum White Value

Because sails are white, some automatic exposure and white balances can be off. Sails may not be overexposed, but can appear so without some attention to maximum white levels. Spend some time working on this so that the very white sails have detail.

Horizontal is a Flexible Concept in Sailing Photography

Figuring out the orientation for sailing photos can be a challenge; the boat is almost never level, the shoreline may not be level if you are shooting on a lake with an irregular shoreline, and the horizon may not be level if there are hills around the lake. Since you will be shooting handheld and quickly from a platform that is bouncing around, is unlikely that many of your images will be perfectly level. If you shoot more than one day, look at your images for a common clockwise or counter-clockwise bias, and work to correct for that in the next day’s photos.

If you really want a laugh, try the auto leveling transformations in Lightroom.

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Written by Bruce Moore

Published: 08 December 2017

Created: 08 December 2017

Last Updated: 08 December 2017

Hits: 2178

• Graphics

Gallery Plugins for Joomla

Many business and organization web sites need to display galleries of photos or figures with the capability to provide or restrict user’s ability to download images. There are many free and fee extensions available for Joomla but two are particularly convenient if you work with Adobe Lightroom or load your images via scp or ftp. The sections that follow discuss two alternatives that use inline syntax within an article to specify a gallery. These are not good choices if you need to take payment for images, but can work for many web sites.

The examples here are taken from a family history web site where images of court probate records are displayed so that site users need not visit a courthouse and potentially damage fragile court records.

Note that many image gallery extensions use a lot of Javascript and CSS; minification, compression, consolidation and caching extensions can cause problems with some options. Make sure to turn off your performance software while you are debugging gallery problems.

Neither of these tools will add images to a site map that you can register with Google; you will need to generate a static site map or use another extension. Similarly, neither of these extensions will put an index.html file in the image directories to prevent an attacker from doing a directory scan of your media folders.

Simple Image Gallery by JoomlaWorks

Simple Image Gallery provides an easy way to make a gallery from an entire directory of images using simple syntax: {gallery}image_directory{/gallery}. It does not have any way to control downloads, and only allows fixed thumbnail sizes or other gallery characteristics–unless you upgrade to Simple Image Gallery Pro.

The free version of this product does not get frequent updates and was broken for a while in the fall of 2017, but was updated to run on Joomla 3.8.

Sigplus by Levente Hunyadi

Sigplus uses identical syntax to Simple Image Gallery, and appears to be a fork of the GPL code in Simple Image Gallery. It uses identical {gallery}image_directory{/gallery} syntax for including a gallery in an article. Sigplus offers much more customization than Simple Image Gallery–especially the ability to fit thumbnails into a bounding box while preserving the aspect ratio. It also allows you to specify a gallery subdirectory for thumbnails and previews, so you can pre-render the images using some other tool. This option also amounts to a permanent cache, so that lightly-used sites have better response times for large galleries.

Sigplus has a search plugin that allows you to search the website for image metadata; for the family history website used in this example, this makes images searchable by surname, location or other tags put into the metadata before exporting from Lightroom. For a community organization web site, this would allow someone to find all photos of themselves if the photos were tagged before export from Lightroom.

Sigplus has a module that gives you a way to incorporate a gallery as part of site design rather than just within an article.

Sigplus is a good alternative if you need more functionality than Simple Image Gallery but do not have the budget for the Simple Image Gallery Pro.

Image Indexing and Site Maps

Both of these extensions use Javascript to manage the image display, so when a robot crawls the page, the image generally will not be indexed by crawling the page. For many uses of a gallery extension, this is the behavior that you want.

If this is not what you want, you will need to create a site map and submit it to the search engines along with your other site maps. Since these plugins do not work with most (if any) Joomla site map extensions, you will need to use another utility to generate site maps of these images if you want Google to index them. If you have shell access to your server, this XML PHP script looks like a good free alternative, though it does not recursively search directories beyond the first level unless you make some changes to the script. If you have PERL installed on your web server, the Google Site Map Generator may work too.

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Written by Bruce Moore

Published: 10 January 2018

Created: 10 January 2018

Last Updated: 11 January 2018

Hits: 2180

• Open Source
• Graphics
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• Joomla
• Photography

House Resolution 3072 is Poorly Conceived and Written

US House Resolution 3072 would increase the minimum size of banks that are subject to direct examination by and reporting to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from $10 billion in assets to $50 billion in assets. As of June, 2017, this would exempt about 80 banks from the examination and reporting rules and leave about 40. I am opposed to this legislation for three reasons:

• A $10 billion bank is not a small bank without the compliance resources to handle examinations and this exempts banks that are big enough that when they do something problematic, the scale is large enough to cause regional problems. The $10 billion threshold represents 2.8% of all banks, while the proposed threshold represents 0.6% of US banks.
• Arbitrary asset limits of either $10 billion or $50 billion do not adjust for inflation, and moving the threshold from $10 billion to $50 billion does nothing to fix this problem. Neither inflation nor the deposit flood that occurs during a panic should push a bank into a different regulatory realm. For the businesses serving banks, regulatory instability is a bigger problem than regulatory burden, and this type of threshold legislation leads to legislative churn and regulatory instability.
• It does not address the different business models employed by banks over $50 billion. There are banks over $50 billion with business models that do not require much CFPB oversight and banks between $10 and $50 billion that should probably receive significant oversight.

Although I am opposed to this legislation, I am not strongly opposed for the simple reason that most of the mischief during the financial crisis occurred at the “too big to fail” banks, and this does not exempt those banks from CFPB examination.

These are Not Small Banks

The current $10 billion threshold is about the 98th percentile in assets ($10.7 billion), while the proposed $50 billion threshold is above the 99th percentile ($30 billion). These are not small banks with a small staff. Figure 1 shows employment by bank as a function of asset value. There are few banks of $10 billion with fewer than 1,000 employees, so these banks already have full-time compliance staff; this does not present the disproportional regulatory burden that it would for banks with less than 1,000 employees. Although this legislation would remove some oversight for some arguably large banks, it leaves in place oversight for the largest banks in a system that is badly skewed to very large banks. To understand the relative size of of banks in the US, Figure 2 shows the asset size distribution–even though it represents more than 5,800 banks the chart looks like an error due to the vast empty space in the right 90% of the histogram. Figure 3 shows only banks larger than $10 billion (about 120 of 5,800) and points out the dramatic skew in bank size.

Arbitrary Dollar Thresholds are Bad Legislation in the First Place

When legislation is written with arbitrary dollar limits as this bill uses, it means that normal inflation will push banks (or taxpayers in the case of the Alternative Minimum Tax) over the threshold when nothing has changed in terms of bank operations. Inevitably, the legislature is slow to reset the threshold, and institutions and consumers struggle to deal with a regulation that was never intended to apply to them. This legislation perpetuates that problem. It guarantees business for lobbyists, but is not a good way to write laws.

For businesses serving the banking industry, regulatory instability is probably a bigger problem than regulatory burden. If regulation is stable, you can automate the solutions, and banks can buy an inexpensive solution. If regulation is unstable, it cannot be automated and the management burden at a bank prevents the bank from innovating any way; the focus is on how to stay in compliance in a changing compliance world. This type of regulatory threshold is ultimately unstable for a larger number of institutions than other approaches.

There are at least two better threshold-based approaches:

• A percent of the total number of banks, such a bank being in the largest 2.5% for three consecutive years. This would present uncertainty for a small number of banks as the industry consolidates, but would not create inflation creep problems due to legislative inaction at some point in the future.
• An asset threshold set as a percentile of asset values. The 98th percentile of assets would currently be approximately $10 billion, while the 99th percentile in assets would be approximately $30 billion. Under normal inflation and consolidation conditions, this would minimize the effects of inflation creep.

A Business-model Approach Would be Best

Some banks just do not touch consumers, and examinations by the CFPB just do not make sense. Table 1 shows the banks that were above $10 billion at the end of June, 2017. There are clearly some banks in this list that have wholesale models where the word “consumer” just does not apply. Figuring out legislation that would take this approach is probably beyond the capability of any legislative body in the United States, so this is probably not a realistic approach, though it would be the best.

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Written by Bruce Moore

Published: 24 October 2017

Created: 24 October 2017

Last Updated: 24 October 2017

Hits: 1633

• Loans
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